What are you currently playing?Brag about your character(s),DM/GMing or playing, what do you prefer?Best campaign story (not storyline, just a story of something awesome you or your party did),What is your favourite game?Best storyline (there we go),What is your least favourite monster?

GO!

_________________"I'm in your vagina, lurkin on your garlics!" - paprikapapaya"My vagina won't even come to the table because she's out fighting crime under the name The Pink Boom." - idatetattooedguys

I'm sad to admit that I almost always play elves. I'm such a sucker, and such a girl.

Plus I'm playing a druid right now (D&D 4e Shuttest The Forsooth Up!, I like it), what the fizzle else would a druid be if not an elf?

Also, we were playing Shadowrun, but the dude that was DMing was driving us nuts. Wanna play again but with a DM that knows we like blood and gore.

The best story was when we introduced a new player - and to this day I don't remember how other than a 1 was rolled, but somehow by the end he'd made his bum a butt of holding. Of course it was so ridiculous that the DM allowed it.

Also, my character may or may not be pregnant with dire wolf pups because I somehow managed to get mounted because I rolled a 1 while in fox form shortly after I'd tamed a dire wolf and my husband is an awesome jerk like that.

Did I mention that my husband is the DM? And he's an author so he makes a GREAT one.

Trying to talk our group into playing Deadlands, but we took a bit of a break recently due to conflicts in schedules, so we gotta get back into our routine first.

What are you currently playing?Playing in two D&D Pathfinder campaigns. Just got started in a Mouseguard campaign and a The One Ring campaign recently. Some of us also get together on occasion and play one-off story games like Fiasco or In a Wicked Age.

Brag about your character(s)Incandesa Hearthstone, female half-elf alchemist 8/bard 1. She joined the campaign initially as a sort of traveling snake oil salesman, selling her tonics of dubious efficacy to support her travels in search of arcane knowledge, but she's gotten a lot more three dimensional, I think.

I also have, in the other Pathfinder campaign, Radimir Valenko, male human fighter 4. He's the descendent of a great warrior and feels alternately oppressed and inspired by his ancestry. He secretly yearns to be a hero, but at the same time, feels like heroism is a simplistic, outdated ideal.

DM/GMing or playing, what do you prefer?I've never actually DM'd, and not sure I'd want to for D&D. Seems like a lot of work with little payoff for the DM. I've been hoping to run a game of Apocalypse World sometime soon, though.Best campaign story (not storyline, just a story of something awesome you or your party did)We've had a lot of hilarious fiascoes spin out of our best laid plans going all agley, but they're not really all that funny unless you were there.What is your favourite game?Best one-shot game, Fiasco. Campaign-length game, well, every attempt apart from D&D seems to fizzle out after a few sessions. We had started a game of Diaspora that began with a lot of promise, but fell apart because of differing personalities and expectations among the players. I also played a one-off session of a hacked version of Apocalypse World at a con, and I think Apocalypse World could easily become one of my favorites, but it's hard to whip up enthusiasm among a group for games that the members aren't too familiar with.Best storyline (there we go)A subplot, really, but my character Incandesa first got involved in the campaign when she returned from abroad after having received rambling, incoherent letters from her grandfather (a scholar who raised her) about his being hunted by cultists. After a few sessions in which looking for her grandfather was a recurrent thread, she found him alive, but driven mad by whatever he had experienced while missing. Incandesa's been able to give him brief periods of lucidity through alchemical treatments, but he's kinda broken still. It's not a major plot element, but it was a clever way for my DM to hook my character into the campaign and give her some opportunities for development.

What is your least favourite monster?Don't think I have a least favorite, but I'm not actually a big fan of beholders. They're kinda silly.

_________________"All PPK gamers should put on their badge of shame right now. You will never leave the no-sex thread." - Vantine"I'm so glad my prison of principles has wifi." - Abelskiver

Back in MY day there were 7 player races (human, dwarf, elf, half-elf, halfling, gnome, half-orc) and we liked it! We rolled our stats on 4 dice and dropped the lowest and there was no rerolling! We had 3 big hardcover rulebooks that were mostly not very useful and our dungeon modules had brightly-colored covers, bizarre illustrations by people with names like Erol Otus, and were denoted by one letter and one number!

Here's a test. Do you know, without googling (the series names are fine)

I'm pretty happy so far with the Pathfinder iteration of D&D. Fourth edition is neither as bad as its detractors, nor as good as its defenders, claim, but for me, it got stale fairly quickly. I think the big mistake was valuing mechanics over flavor, and balance over creativity. It's a fine line between making a system that's impervious to min-maxers without stifling the creativity of those who go for color over crunch, but I think ultimately you have to leave it to those who play the game to find that balance themselves rather than trying to enforce it by arbitrary mechanics.

That being said, there are any number of indie RPGs that I'd rather be playing than D&D in any form, but they break so many of the conventions of traditional RPGs that it's hard to find players willing to give them a serious chance.

_________________"All PPK gamers should put on their badge of shame right now. You will never leave the no-sex thread." - Vantine"I'm so glad my prison of principles has wifi." - Abelskiver

We've been mostly playing Pathfinder, too. Eppy's Dungeon Master really likes running it. I played a half-orc wizard. I always end up playing a wizard or sorcerer and then I get sick of it pretty fast because I want to hit things. It seems like cheating to stand in the back and throw lightning bolts.

My favorite character ever was in a 4e game. She was a halfling rogue named Swanky Bubbles and she just stabbed the shiitake outta people whenever she could. I found a really good name for my next character. I'm reading a book written by a friend of mine called The Dead Gentleman and in it there's an apartment building called the Percy Luxury. Percy Luxury is such an awesome name!

_________________I am not a troll. I am TELLING YOU THE ******GOD'S TRUTH****** AND YOU JUST DON'T WANT THE HEAR IT DO YOU?

OMGs. I've played such a lot of games.DSA (Das schwarze Auge), AD&D, Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Paranoia, Vampire (althought I've also read the sourcebooks for Werewolf, Changeling - old and new World of Darkness - Wraith - now extinct - and Mage), Teenagers from outer Space (DMed one session, was driven half insane by my players, haha). I bet I've forgotten half the things I've played.My favourite gaming expierence ever was a whole weekend of crossover White Wolf World of Darkness. We had a group of Camarilla vampires, a group of Sabbat vampires (I was in that group, and it was such FUN) and a group of werewolves playing in three separate rooms, with occasional near encounters and encounters and a big showdown with everyone at one table in the end.My favourite game might be Paranoia (mutant powers! R&D! trying to have your characters die in spectacular ways!), although I haven't played it in a rather long time.

I've always liked the World of Darkness idea of urban fantasy rooted in real world locations that are familiar to the players. Never actually played the game, but I read several of the old sourcebooks, and ever since, wherever I've lived, I can't help but think of those places and people in World of Darkness tropes. I could easily classify my library patrons in terms of changeling kiths...

_________________"All PPK gamers should put on their badge of shame right now. You will never leave the no-sex thread." - Vantine"I'm so glad my prison of principles has wifi." - Abelskiver

Brag about your character(s), My Apocalypse World character is a delightful cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Hawkeye Pierce.

DM/GMing or playing, what do you prefer? I'm bi-curious.

Best campaign story (not storyline, just a story of something awesome you or your party did), I'll give you one of my favorite scenes. Our heroes have just fled the treasure room of a vine-choked temple, barely escaping with their lives after being tossed around the room by four giant, animated obsidian statues. It's late at night and they're on a boat floating silently down the jungle river, picking gems and coins out of each other's flesh.

What is your favourite game? DON'T MAKE ME CHOOSE!

Best storyline (there we go), Some day soon I'll tell you about the City of Coin and Fire.

my partner and i and a small group of friends (total 6 people) meet every saturday to play D&D and make dinner. sometimes we'll take a break from D&D and watch movies or play other board or card games, like munchkin or 7 wonders.

my character is a tiefling wizard, specializing in fire. most of his attacks are area attacks that hit multiple monsters, so i'm often asking, 'where is the best place to center this attack to hit the most creatures?'. currently level 10, thinking about paragon paths; i'm thinking battle mage. also, he has a book imp as a familiar, so his history and religion checks are awesome.

i've never DM'd. my partner is our current DM, and before that, it was his sister.

our party is constantly doing awesome things. examples include battling a beholder, saving a town and getting a library named after my character, convincing a dragon to help us out of a dungeon, returning magical shoes to a king who ended up not being a king at all, etc, the list continues.

I'm not voting because I don't know if I have a race preference, but maybe I've just not played enough. My gf and I want to play again, and we almost got a campaign running, but in the end it was going to be my GF as DM (which she'd never really done), and Pandacookie and myself. We both drew up our characters and played one night and then we didn't really get back to it before Panda moved. ps- she needs a not-serious chance to play her awesome character! Leather-daddy jug band gnome bard!

So, we are back to finding someone to play with around here. How the hell do you find people to play with?

My favorite storyt: My friend was DM, and always had a weird animosity-filled relationship with another friend, so, he didn't take it so nice on his character (he was known to do that- took it out on my character once when he was angry at the fact that I was still with my ex, but didn't say "I don't think you should be together" so I thought he hated me, oh, dramaqueen). Anyway, we had just started a new campaign, been playing like 20 minutes and we came up on a genie in a bottle. My friend was a greedy money grubbing caster of some sort (don't remember, this was over 10 years ago) and he wished for 1000 gold pieces. The DM says "You hear a whistling sound and look up to catch a glimpse of a bag of gold coins falling from the sky. The bag lands on you. You are dead."

He had to draw up a new character after only 20 minutes of play...heh. I think the rest of us got to divvy up the gold. That campaign also had my ex (who was super at making awesome characters) playing a ball busting feminist paladin, with her mighty mare, "Clithorses."

ETA- Oh! my ex had also played some 16 YO human bard male, and somehow when he died he had the chance at reincarnation...there are like 100 different races, and then the age within that subset. He ended up being reincarnated as...a 17 YO human male.

Also, +1 Munchkin!

_________________Evolved a vascular system, so I went from bryophyte to lycophyte.

1. I'm not currently playing anything because I a) have no friends locally who I could really play with, and b) I don't have the patience to sit down and tabletop game any more. It's kind of sad, but the ADD kicks off hardcore. I think mostly I've lost interest in actual gaming, but I still like to read adventures and rulebooks. Sigh.

2. No characters right now... :(

3. I usually prefer to GM, because I am a control freak and I like to mess with people.

4. I dunno, individual stories? It's been too long. I once made a guy scream and fall out of his chair when GMing Call of Cthulhu. That was fun. It was after a bunch of wandering around fighting some VERY decayed walking dead people, which I described in gratuitous detail. They'd been buried in the mud for, oh, a while, and if you tried to punch them you'd go right through their liquified flesh. Somebody tried to grab one and her hand squished through the deliquesced tissues and she grabbed the spongy bone beneath-- I think she had to leave the room to get a drink of water and some fresh air. And then when they finally found Uncle Timmy's final resting place (he'd made himself immortal and rendered himself down into a pot of living human fat, which they found in a locked shed on the edge of his estate) one of the players made the mistake of opening the lid and peering in. He looked at it for a bit, and then it formed itself into a face and looked at him, and I lunged across the table roaring "COME AND KISS YOUR UNCLE TIMMY" and his face burned off, seared to the bone by Uncle Timmy's malevolent boiling immortal lard-form, and yeah. MAN I loved that game.

5. My favorite game to GM is Call of Cthulhu, followed by old-school World of Greyhawk-stylee AD&D. None of your goofy campaign worlds or dragons and lances or stuff. Greyhawk, baby. Elves, dwarves, orcs, dungeons, dragons, pit traps and 10x10 rooms.

6. We had a great game of Changeling back a long long time ago where we all played grade-school students, like 10 or 12 years old. The GM actually didn't tell us what game we were playing for a couple of weeks of sessions-- we just ran around doing grade school stuff. We built a fort in the woods, we had a rock-throwing fight with some bigger kids (and kicked their asparagi!), we went to school and stuff, and then we had dreams and things... started happening. It was AWESOME.

Solipsistnation, please be my GM. Which is nothing against my current GM, just it sounds like if I can survive one of your campaigns I should not only put that on my resume, but in my cover letter.

_________________"I'm in your vagina, lurkin on your garlics!" - paprikapapaya"My vagina won't even come to the table because she's out fighting crime under the name The Pink Boom." - idatetattooedguys

What are you currently playing?Just finished the Kingmaker adventure path in Pathfinder, and a much shorter Tron-like game (I played a giant floating head comprised of not quite enough polygons). Next up is a Discworld game.

Brag about your character(s)My favorite idea for a character was in a Time & Temp (an excellent time travel game by our very own Epidiah Ravochal!) game. He was a cyborg from the 22nd century who didn't have any cybernetic implants. His parents were cyborgs, as were their parents, so he identified as culturally cybernetic.

My favorite character to play might have been the panda sumo I played in a Usagi Yojimbo game (run by our very own Epidiah Ravochal!) I was playing him as kind of an idiot who just wanted to see the cherry blossom festival in some distant town, more or less oblivious to all the scheming and plotting around him. For some reason, that all worked really well for me. I swear, it's not because I'm an oblivious idiot.

DM/GMing or playing, what do you prefer?Playing.

Best campaign story (not storyline, just a story of something awesome you or your party did)In a Spirit of the Century game, I was playing a Houdini-like character--The Astonishing Kremshaw. In a conflict with some Nazis, I pulled out a little mentalism I remembered from my brief period of interest in magic. It worked like a charm, and the guy running it (Jimbles!) was actually astonished. It was kind of neat?

What is your favourite gameTime and Temp is a lot of fun. I wish I had more Warhammer 3rd edition in my life. Some cool ideas in there that I barely got to play around with. Spirit of the Century has some good stuff going on, especially the in-your-book creation mechanic.

Best storyline (there we go)Maybe the 4th edition D&D game where we all played goblins who had spent their entire lives in a complex of rooms in a dungeon, until some adventures came and stole their sacred relic (a healing potion). I missed half of the sessions of that game, but I still liked it!

I know! I can appreciate their silliness, and they were fine for their time. But they seem really dated now and break the verisimilitude when you're trying to play an otherwise serious game.

Yeah, 'cause you know, it really breaks the mood for your magical sword-fighting game to have floating magical monsters suddenly show up... 8)

I think they're a species that can get misused. (I think this is the case of a lot of AD&D monsters...) They could be weird clever characters in their own right if the DM was smart about it-- they shouldn't be fodder or just a combat encounter. Why not make them the core of the adventure? The big villain, or an ongoing foe or something? Aren't they supposed to be intelligent?

Yeah, the last 2, just like weird floating heads, kind of miss the point. Number 1 has the problem most first edition art had-- it was drawn on the backs of notebooks during class. (Not really, but you get the idea.) Number 2 is pretty decent.

I think that people just say, oh, it's a thing that shoots rays from its eyes, and make it a combat encounter. They shouldn't be just a combat encounter...

I dunno if anyone's looking at this anymore, but I wanted to share... there's a fun podcast on iTunes called Dungeons & Randomness, and while I'm not an RPG player, listening to it makes me wanna play D&D. It's fun, and funny. My husband is one of the guys playing in Episode 11 (Tyson).

Anyway, have a listen.

_________________Yay, and verily he said unto them, "Eat this nooch for it tastes kind of like cheese, and drink this kombucha for it is awesome. And don't be a vegan hating douche because no one likes an asshat." - DancesWithTofu